EcoEquity

The People's Climate Test

Late in June, a coalition of global civil society organizations launched The People’s Test on Climate 2015, a set of high-level considerations that they suggest we keep in mind when we judge the outcome of the Paris COP. As we inevitably will. It aims to highlight the fundamentals: to stress the importance of climate action for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, and to insist that the real goal is and has to be progress towards a more just and sustainable society.

The People’s Climate Test is useful because it skirts the choice between “success” and “failure” — Paris is unlikely to be either — and instead asserts the importance of three high level goals:

* The right to food and water – ensuring people’s access to water and to land for climate resilient food production, stopping land grabs and the ongoing conversion of land from food to commodities like biofuels that are falsely presented as solutions to the climate crisis, and supporting sustainable agro-ecology and climate resilient food production systems

* Justice for impacted people – securing and building the resilience of impacted people including reparations for the world’s impoverished and marginalized people who have no role in causing climate change, yet whose lives and livelihoods are endangered by its effects, supporting a just transition for workers into the new environmentally sustainable and socially inclusive economy, and supporting people- and community-driven adaptation and rehabilitation solutions.

It states these, and then lays out the test itself. “To meet that test, the Paris Summit must:

* Catalyze immediate, urgent and drastic emission reductions – in line with what science and equity require, deliver urgent short-term actions, building towards a long-term goal that is agreed in Paris, that shift us away from dirty energy, marking the beginning of the end of fossil fuels globally, and that keep the global temperature goal in reach;

* Provide adequate support for transformation – ensure that the resources needed, such as public finance and technology transfer, are provided to support the transformation, especially in vulnerable and poor countries;

* Deliver justice for impacted people – enhance the support to adaptation in a new climate regime, ensure that there will be a separate mechanism to provide reparations for any loss and damage that goes beyond our ability to adapt, and make a firm commitment to secure workers’ livelihoods and jobs through a Just Transition;

* Focus on transformational action – ensure that renewable and efficient solutions are emphasized rather than false solutions that fail to produce the results and protection we need, such as carbon markets in land and soil, dangerous geoengineering interventions, and more.”